How to Create a Design Portfolio - Part V: Critical Analysis

A major part of being a designer is being able to look at other games on the market and analyze them in depth. This also becomes a major downside of the job, as it becomes difficult to play a game without casting a critical eye, or trying to work out precisely how something is done. Just remember, that becoming a designer will take away quite a lot of the magic of videogames - be prepared for that!

So - how do you approach analysis of a game?

Narrative
A lot of games tend to have a narrative these days, so as a designer wanting to work on these types of games, an understanding of story is a must. Games still have a long way to go in terms of storytelling - really we are still trying to find our feet, but there are some interesting themes emerging among the wealth of space marine / military fetishism. Bioshock for example uses the narrative to question the nature of player agency - an excellent twist that really made sense of the earlier parts of the game.

There are plenty of resources for good storytelling on the web, it's worth researching a lot of these to get an idea of how a good story is told. Much of it applies to videogames, but there are elements that videogames struggle with - there are also elements that they can do better than other forms of media (exploring the world thoroughly for example).

But there is more to narrative in games than the plot itself. Stories can be told via interactions - characters interacting with each other, or interactions with the world. Environments can also tell a huge amount of story - from small vignettes of one life in this world, to vast changes that may have been inflicted on an entire city, or even planet. Half-Life 2 has a lot of small storytelling in its environment, from newspaper clippings that explain the backstory, to small snippets of people struggling to survive in the world. Some of these small stories can be incredibly moving.

Mechanics Analysis
Mechanics are important to any game, so learning their intricacies and being able to critique them well is an essential skill for a designer.

Look at how intuitive they are, how well they fit with the game, their fluidity, their presentation, how well they are balanced within the system and how they make you feel as a gamer.

Employers are going to be looking at how well you can communicate ideas, so choosing a suitable mechanic and breaking it down in detail will give them a lot of that information. It would also be beneficial to show how you might improve a game mechanic - what sorts of improvements will have a large bang for the buck? Ensure that your improvements aren't going to negatively impact on other aspects of the game.

Level Design Analysis
Good level design is hard to do, but there are plenty of examples of superb level design out there. There are also some examples of poorly thought-out layout that people get lost in, or frustrated. Being able to determine what elements of these contribute to the ease or difficulty of navigation is an important skill.

Levels should also be believable - not necessarily realistic, but they must make sense for the world. I like to breakdown level design by the following attributes:

• Function - what is this space used for, in terms of physical function (what is this space for in the world), "ludic" function (what this space is used for in gameplay terms) and narrative function (what this space represents in the story).
• Form - the physical shape of a space and the items within it - landmarks, architectural style, how well the space fits the world, etc.
• Flow - the physical flow (organisation of space and movement through it), the "ludic" flow (how the player moves through the space, the pacing of events and goals) and narrative flow (showing the progression of the narrative through the world space.

So when you are analysing a space you want to try and look at it in the terms above: is this space easy to navigate? does the combat space offer a lot of options? what is this scenario doing in terms of gameplay? does the story fit with the gameplay experience?

Balance Analysis 
When looking at balance, you are really trying to evaluate how individual elements fit within the whole. You are looking to see if a game has achieved a state of flow through a carefully balanced difficulty curve. You are also looking to see if a game has exploits or some element that breaks the balancing of the game.

Look to see if the worth of items is set correctly, or whether the psychology of the balance matches the feeling the game is trying to portray - i.e. are you starved of ammo in a survival horror game?

Look for a good sense of multiple strategies and potential tactics. Are there lots potential actions - is there any depth in particular mechanics?

What market is the game catering for? Sometimes a game may be particularly dumbed down in your estimation, but are you the intended audience, or have they added a difficulty level that does cater for you?


Overall Experience
A game is often more than the sum of its parts. Each of these parts contributes to the overall experience, as a designer being able to talk about this overall experience is also very important. Whilst there may be issues with individual aspects of a game, it may be able to overcome them - this is a chance for you to describe why something has this elevated status - or perhaps why the overall experience doesn't come together for some reason.

Conclusion

Casting an objective eye over games is an important skill. Looking at great games can give you a real insight as to great techniques to hook the player, but "bad" games can also be important to look at, not only to see what problems they have, but also to occasionally find the nugget of an idea that can be refined and improved upon. As a designer, playing games is research, it may make you lose some of the magic of playing games, but it also gives you a great excuse to play more of them. So go ahead and play - you might learn something!